Tag Archives: jake heggie

Arts & Entertainment, Music

“Stunning” Premieres from Jake Heggie & Gene Scheer at Music of Remembrance

Morgan Smith, baritone

Completing its 15th season Tuesday night at Nordstrom Recital Hall, Music of Remembrance once again gave its audience music and memories that propel discussion and stay with you long after the performance is over.

Composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, both continuously in demand by major opera companies, important musical organizations and musicians, took time, again, from their busy work schedules to create another work for Music of Remembrance.

In fact, two works.

Their group of songs, Farewell, Auschwitz, explores the enduring legacy of Polish Jew Krystyna Zywulska through the poetry she wrote as a political prisoner in Auschwitz, her Jewish identity unrealized by the Nazis. It’s a continuation of the music drama they premiered with MOR last season, Another Sunrise, on the appalling dilemmas Zywulska faced in her painful struggle to stay alive and make a difference.

But as well as this important premiere, Heggie and Scheer also created a distillation of their first work for MOR in 2007: a song cycle from their music drama For a Look or a Touch, which brought to prominence Nazi persecution of gays though the diary of a young gay man, Manfred Lewin, who was murdered at Auschwitz but whose partner survived.

It was the performance of this distillation which left the strongest impression of Tuesday night’s concert. Baritone Morgan Smith, who created the role of the diarist as ghost in 2007, sang the cycle of five songs. A 2000 graduate of Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, he has honed his strong baritone and considerable acting skills to a fine international operatic career, but, like Heggie and Scheer, he has come back to MOR more than once.

With a quintet of flute (Zart Dombourian-Eby), clarinet (Laura DeLuca), violin (Mikhail Shmidt), cello (Walter Gray), and piano (Craig Sheppard), Smith embodied the despair of the Auschwitz present, the memory of freedom, fun and love in prewar Berlin, the yearning and grieving of the now, the witnessing of horror with the incongruity of Nazi musical overlay, and speechless sorrow.

The poignancy of his acting, this tall man with long arms at a music stand, the agony in his big voice, had the audience riveted as he brought to life Scheer’s beautiful lyrics drawn from Lewin’s diary with Heggie’s music. This mirrored the times, including the Weill-like sassiness of 1930s Berlin with a memorable jazzy clarinet solo from DeLuca in “Golden Years,” the celestial, melancholic imagery in “A Hundred Thousand Stars,” and the nightmarish contrasts between savagery and sweet waltz in “The Story of Joe.”

Hearing this performance would alone have made the concert memorable, but the premiere of Farewell, Auschwitz after intermission added more.

Music of Remembrance rehearsal of “Farewell, Auschwitz” (Photo: MOR)

Zywulska, who never previously had written lyrics, wrote them to keep herself going in Auschwitz and set them to popular music of the day. They took fire in the camp, and because of them she was given a job in the Effektenkammer, the warehouse where were collected the belongings stripped from new female prisoners before they were gassed. This effectively kept Zywulska alive.

In Farewell, Auschwitz, Scheer took Zywulska’s satiric poems or fragments thereof and made free poetic adaptations, while Heggie, facing the impossiblity of finding the original tunes, created music which might have been of that era, either movie or Weill-like or folk melodies, even adding a bit of Chopin and Liszt. All of it, however, had an indefinable touch of today in harmonies or musical progressions.

Smith was again one of the singers, along with soprano Caitlin Lynch and mezzo soprano Sarah Larsen, also past graduates of Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, while the instrumental quintet included DeLuca, Shmidt, Gray, Sheppard, and Jonathan Green, double bass.

The lyrics are intense, moving portrayals of life in the camp and at the same time songs of resistance, brilliant writing by Scheer from Zywulska’s original words. Heggie’s music is equally brilliant, evocative of the era, descriptive of the words — and at times shocking in its impact, particularly in the final song, also titled “Farewell Auschwitz.” At the end, the three singers gripped hands and stood defiant:

Take off your striped clothes;
Kick off your clogs.
Stand with me.
Hold your shaved head high.
The song of freedom upon our lips
Will never, never die.

I was not the only one in the audience with tears in my eyes.

I would have preferred Lynch and Larsen to pitch their voices a little more softly at times, given that Nordstrom holds only 540 seats rather than 3,000, but that was my only quibble.

Two instrumental works completed the program. Laszlo Weiner’s String Trio—Serenade of 1938 introduced us to a fine work from a composer whose life was cut short in 1944 in Lukov labor camp. It was well played by Shmidt, violist Susan Gulkis Assadi, and cellist Mara Finkelstein, and worth hearing again.

The concert opened with a 1930 violin-and-piano adaptation of a suite from Weill’s The Three Penny Opera, done by a close friend of Weill’s, Stefan Frankel, who eventually became concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera orchestra. It’s a showy and difficult violin part—shades of Paganini—but the performance sounded as though it was a first rehearsal by pianist (and founder and moving spirit of MOR) Mina Miller and violinist Leonid Keylin. Keylin, an excellent violinist, brought no soul to this. The work didn’t seem to speak to him, so it also didn’t speak to us.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Jake Heggie Tackles the Burden of Memory in Another Sunrise

Soprano Caitlin Lynch, right, rehearses Another Sunrise with the MOR Ensemble.

“I love coming back to Seattle and Music of Remembrance,” declares composer Jake
Heggie, his words endorsed by librettist Gene Scheer. These two men, up to their eyebrows in prestigious commissions (an opera each, one for Dallas, one for San Francisco, a symphony and chamber music for Heggie, plus more), can’t say enough in praise of Music of Remembrance, its founding director Mina Miller, and its musicians.

They are here for the premiere at MOR of their latest work, Another Sunrise, on Monday May 14 at Benaroya Hall.

“It’s so important for us that the work that we do is meaningful. Every program with Mina and MOR teaches me something informative, educational, and enriching before I even put pen to paper. Every time I come to Music of Remembrance, I come away a better person,” he says.

The mission of Music of Remembrance, now in its 14th season, is to remember Holocaust musicians, poets, and artists through musical performances, educational programs, musical recordings, and commissions of new works, in two concerts a year held at times meaningful to Holocaust survivors, plus a series of smaller, free performances, and a lot of educational outreach.

“It starts with Mina,” says Scheer. (The two men, who have worked closely together on a number of works, the most recent for MOR being the 2007 music drama For a Look or a Touch, speak in tune with one another, their thoughts in parallel.) “She has a visionary, passionate intelligence which yields incredible results. She’s one of the most articulate people I know. She has enthusiasm, generosity, and a conviction that these stories must be told.

“She looks for an unusual angle with which to approach the material,” says Heggie. “She wants a fresh perspective, how the past lives in present memory.”

“It begins with what happened and how does one remember,” says Scheer. ”How do we tell this narrative and makes sense of those lives?”

The process for Another Sunrise began when Miller asked the two men what they would like to write about for MOR. As they hashed out ideas, what came to the fore was the question of what survivors feel, the burden of their memories.

“Who knows what we are capable of when there is a gun to our heads?” queries Scheer, “so, we came up with the nature of survival.”

At this point Miller found, and gave them to read, two books written by one of those Holocaust survivors, Krystyna Zywulska. As they learned more about this woman, her story seemed to fill the bill. “She had to do things to survive which haunted her the rest of her life,” says Heggie. (Miller was able to find Zywulska’s son, Tadeusz Andrzejewski, and he has come from Paris for the premiere Monday and will speak about his mother.)

And then, Scheer found an interview Zywulska gave in Poland to a political science professor for a book on survival memories.

“I sensed that her responses could be the fulcrum for this piece,” says Scheer. “Her frustration with what she could not put into words, that she couldn’t describe,” an ironic situation, as Zywulska had survived Auschwitz-Birkenau through writing satirical lyrics set to popular tunes, and later made a careeer writing lyrics for pop songs.

She had no answers that she found truly satisfactory to how she survived in Auschwitz. Heggie and Scheer came up with an approach to Zywulska’s story which is fictional in format but true to the story Zywulska tells in her autobiographies.

“We thought, What if the professor had given her a tape recorder, to tell that what she could when the words came to her, and that became the dramatic device we created,” says Scheer. “She wakes in the middle of the night and can’t sleep. This is years later, and she’s haunted by things she couldn’t say, a melody she hums and can’t find the words to. She turns on the machine—and turns it off. What does she want to leave for posterity? As she talks she defines herself, only she can’t find the words.”

“So what can’t be described in words, can be described in music,” says Heggie. “My job is to empathize deeply with the character, only she’s not just a character, she’s a real person. I needed to get into her heart, to the very purest part, and just feel and respond, as a musical soul. She’s on an emotional rollercoaster. It’s a dark night of the soul. She’s trying to make sure others don’t go through what she went through.”

Says Gene, “We are both after the same thing, the storytelling. If I’m doing my job right, I’m building the scaffolding for the musical landscape being depicted on stage. It’s not that the words would fade away, we want people to take away the emotional experience.” One singer, a chamber ensemble, and minimal staging make up the dramatic scene for Another Sunrise.

For the solo role, Heggie and Scheer chose soprano Caitlin Lynch, a graduate of Seattle Opera Young Artist program who sang Micaela in Seattle Opera’s most recent Carmen, an intelligent, sensitive artist with the technique and voice to match. “She even looks like Krystyna,” comments Heggie.

Lastly, he says, “This is a work of art, it’s not a documentary. What we are after is her emotional life, something that resonates as true.”

“Everything described here is true,” says Scheer, “but in language I created, though there are two or three quotes I took from her interview.”